The Politics of Dancing

Not since the summer of 1980 has the triumphalism of the forces of reaction been so great. In an orgy of petty spite, cruelty, vindictiveness and vicious class war, the government has turned on children and the young, the BBC, the Trade Union movement and its links with the Labour Party. It assaults Freedom of Information [FOI], and human rights legislation, and, with its obsession with ‘English Votes for English Laws’ the very union itself. For sheer reckless vandalism, bad faith and malign intention it manages to even outdo Norman Tebbit at his most toxic. I n the face of this threat the Labour Party seems determined to commit suicide by electing the Trotskyite fellow traveller and friend of clerical fascists, Jeremy Corbyn. A man who, if he had had his way and prevented US intervention against ISIS, would have seen Kobane occupied now by Daesh. Who supported Milosevic and thought Bosnia was about Western Intervention, and who believes that NATO not Putin is the greatest threat...

European civil wars tore not only Europe apart twice in the twentieth century, but dragged the rest of the world into the fight. At the core of the European struggle lay the conflict between Germany and France. This led in 1950 to a rare act of inspirational idealism, the formation of the European Coal and Steel Community uniting European countries economically and politically in order to secure lasting peace. The six founders were Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. This was the embryo EU that grew into we have today. It was not of course an act of pure idealism, commercial interests were interwoven into the EU from the very start, and it was commercial factors that influenced the British Yes vote in 1975. (Though Edward Heath, who negotiated our entry into what was then the common market, was essentially an idealist when it came to Europe). At the heart of the project was always ‘ever closer union.’ Whilst the essential driving force was social ...

Since his unexpected election victory David Cameron has begun to suffer from delusions of grandeur, beginning to see himself as all powerful, wise and the possessor of awesome powers. This is particularly true when it comes to the BBC, an organisation already cowed by pre-election Tory threats. Cameron and his Tory chums from the upper fifth, Oxford and Bullingdon, have been lording it over the BBC since the result was declared. Cameron believed the BBC was against him during the campaign, – it was not of course, if anything its bias was against the left, though it did attempt impartiality at times, which outraged Cameron,- and with victory secured he is out for revenge. Thus we have Imam Cameron demonstrating the fruits of years of Islamic scholarship explaining to the BBC, in the tone of an irritated headmaster, that the term Islamic State must “no longer appear in your essays boy.” Those fighting for the ‘caliphate’ in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt had ‘nothing to do with Isla...